


Walking with Witches

by AuntG



Series: Run [2]
Category: American Horror Story: Apocalypse
Genre: (Mentioned) Michael Langdon, Animal Transformation, Bats, Clowns, Corpses, Exes, Hair, Hallucinations, Mild Language, Mutation, Post-Apocalypse, Psychological Torture, Roosters, Sensory Overload, Survival Horror, Unhappy Ending, Vegetables, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-17 21:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29107251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuntG/pseuds/AuntG
Summary: Written after "Pepper Run", this story will be an account of the events that take place when the witches arrive at Outpost 3 and be chronologically parallel to the events of "Sanctuary City" up to chapter 19.
Series: Run [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1565206
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	1. Bock, Bock, Brock

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Michael really shouldn't design greenhouses.
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing, not even the Empty.
> 
> Rated T for cussing and for the non graphic but disturbing cannon content mentioned in the tags.
> 
> I will be continuing "Sanctuary City", my Michael/Gallant story and if you have been reading it, the events of this story will be alluded to in the next chapter.

After drawing out of the muck of the Louisiana swamp, four witches emerged to breathe the faintly radioactive air for the first time in two years; Cordelia Goode, Myrtle Snow, Marie Laveau, and Madison Montgomery.

"Well that sucked ass." Madison said as she pointlessly started rubbing the dirt and the swamp slime off. "I had worms crawling up my nose and God knows where else. How long have we been buried here?"

"Oh, I don't know. A year, maybe two." replied Myrtle. "The healing properties of the swamp, my dear."

Myrtle turned to Cordelia.

"Delia…" she said with concern "you felt it too."

"It's time." Cordelia agreed.

*****

The witches traveled to the outskirts of Los Angeles to what had once been the Hawthorne Academy and had become Outpost 3.They entered the spiral and took the elevator down into the building below.

"Find our sisters." Cordelia ordered imperiously as she stood in the lobby below the stairs.

The witches spread out.

After a few minutes Myrtle returned, sorrowfully cradling Mallory's body.

Cordelia tried again and again to revive her and failed.

After an hour the others returned. But, to Cordelia's surprise, they returned not with Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt and the traitor Dinah Stevens. Instead, Marie and Madison were each carrying a stranger. The first was a woman in purple who had been shot in the chest and who could have been Cordelia's double, and the second was an old woman in a champagne silk nightie. The old woman and Mallory appeared to have died the same way, with the mark of an animal bite on a limb and foam at the mouth.

"Who are they?" Cordelia asked tiredly.

"Delia, I believe that was the receptionist from Kineros."

"The one with the cane and the sour disposition?" Madison asked, having heard about Myrtle and Cordelia using their magic to convince the CEOs of that robotics company to add Coco to their list.

"It's remarkable how much she looks like our sweet Delia now that her resting bitch face is gone." commented Myrtle.

"We're getting off topic." Cordelia said with a scowl "Marie, I need you to find Mallory's soul."

Marie fell into a trance.

"Who's the old bat?" Madison said, unwilling to let the topic drop. "She looks familiar."

"Probably because she is the very famous soap opera and horror film actress Evie Gallant."

"Who--"

"I can't!" Marie gasped as she came abruptly awake. "Her soul is gone."

"Are you certain?"

"He destroyed it…" Marie said with a mournful moan.

"Check the others." Cordelia demanded tersely.

Marie went into another trance, only to shake her head sadly a few moments later. 

"They're gone too."

Cordelia winced.

"Right then. Let's check every room in this place, perhaps we will get lucky and find our remaining sisters, or, if they have made their escape, some indication of where they have gone. We will meet back here in half an hour."

*****

This is how they learned of the apples that had been poisoned with snake venom, and evidence that it appeared that about twenty people had left the building in a hurry.

When Myrtle exited what she suspected was Coco's room (there was a pearl handled comb lying on a desk) she was surprised by a knife wielding tumor covered man. 

"You thieving hag!" he shouted as he lunged at her and managed to hack off some of her glorious orange mane.

Furious, she cast a spell that turned him into a rooster and picked the squawking creature up. He then tried to bite her so she spellbound his beak shut. He glared at her with evil beady eyes as she returned to the lobby.

"What do you have there?" Marie asked. Myrtle showed her the rooster and Marie began to laugh.

"Why would they keep a rooster? Wouldn't a hen make more sense… I mean, they lay eggs at least."

"You're right. Like all men, roosters are pointless. But they didn't keep a rooster, up until a few minutes ago he was a man, a tumorous outsider I found in Coco's room."

"Ew. So he was, what, scavenging the place?" Madison asked.

"Feel free to ask him. Cordelia, would you care to do the transmutation?" Myrtle said as she set the rooster on the ground.

As Cordelia transformed him back into a man, Myrtle cast a spell to bind his arms. Then she lifted the silencing spell.

"I'm not telling you bitches anything."

"You will tell us everything." Cordelia declared.

*****

Brock, as his name turned out to be, didn't know much of anything: He was Coco's ex-husband and an A-list action star and still she had left him behind when the bomb went off. It took him a long time and a considerable amount of effort to learn about the location of Outpost 3. But eventually he arrived and when he got to the building three hours prior, it was only to discover that they had already evacuated it. 

"...So I ate some vacuum sealed food cubes and took a nap. Then I went to take a leak, and that's when the frizzy she-bitch attacked me." Brock finished his story with a glare.

"You attacked me." Myrtle said with a sniff as she brushed her shorn locks.

"I kept my word. Are you witches going to heal me or not???"

"Not." Myrtle said with a smile.

"You bitch!" Brock said as he attempted to lunge at her, the restraints keeping him back.

"Such a temper. I think you were better off before." Myrtle said, and then she began to chant.

"Myrtle…"

Mid-transformation the restraints loosened to the point that the half-man half-rooster bolted down a corridor.

"Go after him!" Cordelia shouted.

They chased him down several corridors until they reached a dark panelled circular room with manacles hanging from the ceiling. They looked down and saw that the wood panels on the floor had been split and pulled up, revealing a concrete circular tunnel with a metal ladder leading down about fifteen feet.

*****


	2. In the Primordial Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My working title for this chapter was Suicide Run:  
> Lots of peppers. Hallucinations. The usual.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised; the second chapter 24 hours later.
> 
> A greenhouse fit for the H. H. Holmes and Gardens magazine.

They spent several minutes clearing out the splintered remains of the wooden boards. 

Eventually, the unstable wooden flooring was no longer deemed hazardous as it was cleared to the extent that they were able to stand on the natural stone that ringed the concrete tunnel before making their descent one by one.

"Why did you turn him into a chicken anyway?" Madison asked as she stepped carefully down the rings of the ladder.

"He didn't deserve it, darling. Besides didn't you find it odd that Mallory was missing a few organs?" Myrtle replied huffing as she slowly made her way down the ladder just a few steps above Madison.

"You don't mean he--" Madison replied aghast.

"He wouldn't be the first to resort to cannibalism."

"Gross." Madison said, wrinkling her nose.

She stepped down the final rung and looked around. There, she found herself in a stone circular room with florescent lighting and one other arched exit.

Slowly, Myrtle followed after, then Marie, and finally Cordelia.

As the witches walked through the archway they found themselves walking into an extremely long well lit tunnel with a ten foot wide path, flanked on either side by row after row of plants with red or yellow peppers. 

"Did he transform fully into a rooster?" Madison asked.

Myrtle nodded.

"He'll be running among the peppers like a chicken with it's head cut off." Marie commented.

"It doesn't matter. Langdon has made a huge mistake; this is clearly the way the others went--we'll travel to the end and we will find them." Cordelia said, and they started down the path.

The tunnel seemed to stretch for miles and the only thing that seemed to change was the type of pepper; from Carolina Reapers to Ghost Peppers to Naga Vipers to New Mexico Scorpions.

The tunnel was also very quiet, as they trudged along it for hours the only sounds that broke up the monotony were a murmured comment here and there, the faint squawk of a chicken, and the hissing sound of machinery.

Suddenly, the lights go out and they are plunged into total darkness.

*****

In the total darkness there was a low moan. Then there was the sound of footsteps and the chink of metal chains. Then a fan turned on, or maybe it was the whirring of a saw blade. A rooster crowed.

"Puh-lease, I've had scarier experiences at funhouses." Madison scoffed as she tried to hide her unease.

The fans got louder. There was a sound similar to tearing metal.

"Can you hear me--" said Marie.

"Does anyone smell--" said Myrtle.

"We'll chant a spell to cancel--" Cordelia declared loudly.

"Fuck, I think it's getting closer!" Madison screamed while she ran, as figments only she could see chased after her.

*****

The sudden jolt of her arm from Madison's panicked run caused Myrtle to trip and fall, her slackened grip releasing Madison. Myrtle looked up, the aroma she had noticed earlier coalescing into swirls of phantom bats with soulless red eyes that stared hungrily at her before they began their descent. Despite knowing an illusion when she saw one Myrtle screamed.

*****

The combined sound of the saws and the screams was deafening. The sound of the saws got louder, increasing to about 100 decibels. 110 decibels. 125 decibels. 140. 150. 165… Marie could no longer hear anything else.

Suddenly, Marie saw a Loa in the periphery of her vision. It was Baron Samedi, chomping on a cigar. She still couldn't see anything or anyone else so she knew she must be seeing him with her other sight. She stared at him and he nodded.

*****

Cordelia ignored the inebriated knife wielding clown wearing her late husband's face. Fortified by the fact that she'd faced the real thing and won, she began to chant.

*****

The darkness was silent once more, when suddenly--

Too bright, too intense, too abrupt--the light flared out from the ceiling of the tunnel, the tunnel's walls, and the floor of the walkway as the light changed from regular 1600 U.V. bulbs to the multiple L.E.D.s giving off 5,000 lumens a piece. 

At that intensity the light pierced retinas and elicited gasps of pain as their eyes closed with the instinct of self preservation and their pain filled tongues loosened into loud colorful polylingual invectives. 

This was how they determined that Madison had fallen to her knees amongst the orange habaneros a hundred feet ahead.

Eyes squeezed shut, Cordelia reached blindly towards the nearest witch, Myrtle, and grabbed her arm to pull her up off the ground.

"Let's separate into two groups:" Cordelia declared "Myself and Myrtle will turn towards the left, and Madison will rejoin us, then her and Marie will turn to the right. We'll take our chances with the plants." 

"Okay, but, where's Marie gone?" Myrtle asked after she was finally able to open her watering eyes to the small protection afforded to her in filtering the light from the walls by the large teardrop leaves of the yellow Fatalii peppers.

"Langdon's work, no doubt." Cordelia hautily replied as she peered through her eyelashes looking for the other witch.

"Marie?" Madison asked with confusion as she used the shelter of the plants to retreat back to the group.

"Disappeared."

"Fuck. Now what?" Madison asked.

"We move forward, walking sideways like crabs."

"We're not going to look for her?"

"We can't. Our powers are unstable thanks to whatever hallucinogenic he hit us with earlier." Myrtle said.

"Hallucinogenic?"

"Darling, I lived through the sixties. I knew the moment I smelled it." Myrtle replied.

"If he has her, the best thing we can do is to join hands and keep moving towards them." Cordelia said.

"This sucks ass." Madison complained as she got into position. 

*****

_Hours later..._

They were about two hundred feet away from an imposing circular door when the ground began to shake. 

"Run!" shouted Cordelia as they speedily stumbled towards the exit, Cordelia in the lead.

Cordelia was also the one who touched the door and was promptly shocked into unconsciousness by a few thousand volts of current. 

As the three witches fell unconscious, the lights dimmed, the ground stopped shaking, and an alarm began to blare.

*****

The End

Or is it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope the witches weren't too OOC.

**Author's Note:**

> I will post the second half tomorrow on Monday.
> 
> Please, please leave a comment?


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